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Critics Consensus: Gold boasts an impressively committed performance from Matthew McConaughey, but it's just one glittering nugget in an otherwise uneven heap of cinematic silt.
Critic Consensus: Gold boasts an impressively committed performance from Matthew McConaughey, but it's just one glittering nugget in an otherwise uneven heap of cinematic silt.
All Critics (175) | Top Critics (41) | Fresh (74) | Rotten (101)
Despite McConaughey's commitment to the role, his Kenny is more pathetic than sympathetic, which makes caring about him for two hours a difficult task.
McConaughey has zero bromantic chemistry with his co-star, Edgar Ramírez, who phones in a dull, blank performance.
Torn between hard-hitting satire on the pitfalls of capitalism and goofy, upbeat we're-in-the-money clichés.
You feel weirdly uninvolved, and ever more unsurprised by the lurches of fate.
The movie is a mess, but it's also an oddly amoral mess.
If a single performance could make a film, Gold would be, well, solid. McConaughey whoops and hollers and canters, delivering gimlet-eyed eulogies to the precious metal that has long bewitched him, but the film doesn't hold half the heat of his obsession.
The characters are fun and the plot serviceable, but it distinctly lacks a hook.
A takedown of the kind of high-octane greed and speculation that lead to financial crashes, it stars Matthew McConaughey in all his sweaty, bouncing-off-the-walls, Wolf of Wall Street and Dallas Buyers Club glory.
Gaghan never catches you up in Wells's gold-fever dream, so the movie, like his plan, falls apart. His attempt to impose a mock-heroic template on the material, doesn't fit.
But "Gold" proves that you need more than a thinning hairline and a bulging waistline.
Gold is entertaining enough, mostly because McConaughey and Ramirez are compelling actors.
This would have been better served as a segment on Drunk History.
Stephen Gaghan has worked mostly behind the scenes as a screenwriter in his early days when he first hit LA with "I Know What You Did Last Summer." Since then, he has graced us with "Traffic" (screenwriter) and "Syriana" (screenwriter/director) as his only two "fresh" movies. Fast forward nearly 12 years, and he has all-star actor Matthew McConaughey under his wing with a story worthy of putting on the silver screen. It's just a shame what should be a shining bright nugget gets stuck in the mud without a sifter to help find its way to the light. McConaughey puts in a fully committed performance as Kenny Wells. Too bad it goes to waste on a movie that doesn't quite hold your attention with the story as much as it does with his eccentric transformation. It's a age-old classic of the American Dream, except instead of drugs and violence, we get Gold. Think a poor man's Wolf of Wallstreet and about an hour shorter. While Scorsese's movie dragged for hours with detail on even the most trivial of things, Gold doesn't give enough of it to accurately portray the full picture. It's tough to watch a McConaughey movie and not be impressed by his acting, but it's another thing to watch a movie that so under utilizes his talents because the script is so light in all the right spots. Without the relationships, we have no one and nothing to pin our eye to.
Super Reviewer
Much like The Founder, Gold is a story about ambition, persistence, and the American Spirit. While it's not as good as The Founder was, McConoughey and Ramirez performances are enough to give this film a passing grade.
You can have man breasts and a crappy comb over but still it is McConaughey playing himself in Gold . First section was so boring I feel asleep but woke up in time to kinda enjoy the last half. Where did the actor McConaughey go that was so terrific in Mud? BDH was nice to look at at least. First bummer of '17. (2-2-17)
Kenny Wells is a mess and that is pretty evident from the moment he appears on screen hoping to charm the curls right out of Bryce Dallas Howard's eighties frizzled hair, but even as he does this it's easy to tell there is no real thought behind his actions other than what the immediate rewards might be. This is key to understanding the type of mentality we'll be working with for the next two hours as Wells is a man who believes himself lucky to have been born into a family that started a mining company and who intends to carry it on even after the death of his father (Craig T. Nelson). Wells takes the idea from his father that they don't necessarily have to do this for a living as it's a crap shoot of a business, but instead pride themselves of getting to do this for a living. The question they're seemingly missing the answer to though, is the ever-present why? What are they doing this for? Seven years on after the passing of the elder Wells and Matthew McConaughey's Kenny has his men working out of a bar, trying to keep a lid on expenses, and coming up short in seemingly everything, but chiefly in keeping his family's business afloat. As a man who can't help but to try and survive for the next few weeks rather than the next twenty years Wells sees no other option other than to do whatever it takes to keep that business running. He is a man who puts a lot of stock in legacy in the way that he seems to inherently ask himself how proud his father would be were he to still be alive-would he be happy with what Kenny has done with their business? After the rather stirring opening and tone-setting title card fade away it becomes pretty clear that Kenny Wells is in a position neither his father nor his grandfather ever found themselves in. The guy is desperate to find backers for digs that no one believes in and that no one seems to believe will yield any results. Sure, Wells has responsibilities to his employees that are dedicated enough to work out of that aforementioned bar, to Howard's Kay who has stuck with him still and now works at that same bar as a waitress most of the time doubling as his secretary, but the biggest responsibility Kenny feels is clearly to that legacy he is set to taint. And so, Wells takes a chance, a risk-one that could fail just as easy as it could succeed, but one that perfectly encapsulates and sets the stage for how this protagonist McConaughey fully commits to will operate in the mostly entertaining circumstances Gold presents. read the whole review at www.reviewsfromabed.com
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